RPG Evolution: The Trouble with Halflings

Over the decades I've developed my campaign world to match the archetypes my players wanted to play. In all those years, nobody's ever played a halfling.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

So What's the Problem?​

Halflings, derived from hobbits, have been a curious nod to Tolkien's influence on fantasy. While dwarves and elves have deep mythological roots, hobbits are more modern inventions. And their inclusion was very much a response to the adventurous life that the agrarian homebodies considered an aberration. In short, most hobbits didn't want to be adventurers, and Bilbo, Frodo, and the others were forever changed by their experiences, such that it was difficult for them to reintegrate when they returned home. You don't hear much about elves and dwarves having difficulty returning home after being adventurers, and for good reason. Tolkien was making a point about the human condition and the nature of war by using hobbits as proxies.

As a literary construct, hobbits serve a specific purpose. In The Hobbit, they are proxies for children. In The Lord of the Rings, they are proxies for farmers and other folk who were thrust into the industrialized nightmare of mass warfare. In both cases, hobbits were a positioned in contrast to the violent lifestyle of adventurers who live and die by the sword.

Which is at least in part why they're challenging to integrate into a campaign world. And yet, we have strong hobbit archetypes in Dungeons & Dragons, thanks to Dragonlance.

Kender. Kender Are the Problem​

I did know one player who loved to play kender. We never played together in a campaign, at least in part because kender are an integral part of the Dragonlance setting and we weren't playing in Dragonlance. But he would play a kender in every game he played, including in massive multiplayers like Ultima Online. And he was eye-rollingly aggravating, as he loved "borrowing" things from everyone (a trait established by Tasselhoff Burrfoot).

Part of the issue with kender is that they aren't thieves, per se, but have a child-like curiosity that causes them to "borrow" things without understanding that borrowing said things without permission is tantamount to stealing in most cultures. In essence, it results in a character who steals but doesn't admit to stealing, which can be problematic for inter-party harmony. Worse, kender have a very broad idea of what to "borrow" (which is not limited to just valuables) and have always been positioned as being offended by accusations of thievery. It sets up a scenario where either the party is very tolerant of the kender or conflict ensues. This aspect of kender has been significantly minimized in the latest draft for Unearthed Arcana.

Big Heads, Little Bodies​

The latest incarnation of halflings brings them back to the fun-loving roots. Their appearance is decidedly not "little children" or "overweight short people." Rather, they appear more like political cartoons of eras past, where exaggerated features were used as caricatures, adding further to their comical qualities. But this doesn't solve the outstanding problem that, for a game that is often about conflict, the original prototypes for halflings avoided it. They were heroes precisely because they were thrust into difficult situations and had to rise to the challenge. That requires significant work in a campaign to encourage a player to play a halfling character who would rather just stay home.

There's also the simple matter of integrating halflings into societies where they aren't necessarily living apart. Presumably, most human campaigns have farmers; dwarves and elves occupy less civilized niches, where halflings are a working class who lives right alongside the rest of humanity in plain sight. Figuring out how to accommodate them matters a lot. Do humans just treat them like children? Would halflings want to be anywhere near a larger humanoids' dwellings as a result? Or are halflings given mythical status like fey? Or are they more like inveterate pranksters and tricksters, treating them more like gnomes? And if halflings are more like gnomes, then why have gnomes?

There are opportunities to integrate halflings into a world, but they aren't quite so easy to plop down into a setting as dwarves and elves. I still haven't quite figured out how to make them work in my campaign that doesn't feel like a one-off rather than a separate species. But I did finally find a space for gnomes, which I'll discuss in another article.

Your Turn: How have you integrated halflings into your campaign world?

 

[Charlaquin]

There should be. And technically, any race that gets a bonus to Dex (which is all Small races and several Medium ones) will be a good race to play rogues with.

Right, I agree with you; I’m using the Socratic method.

 

[Faolyn]

So, you have often heard people describe dwarves as "the armor wearing race?"

 

[Crimson Longinus]

My personal go-to is to say that such creatures are all the same race and culture(s), it's just that the race itself is highly variable and not every member has the same abilities. "Reptilian" is a race. If you want to play one can choose from dragonborn or lizardfolk stats (or kobold or whatever other reptilian races can be found in D&D).

I'm too OCD for system aesthetics for that to not bother me. I could tolerate it in someone else's game, but I wouldn't do it that way in mine. Like it obviously is a post hoc kludge for different race mechanics. I would start from the fiction I have (in this case one lizard species) and choose a or write rules for that. If variability is part of the fiction, then that is written in the unified lizard rules.

 

[James Gasik]

At the risk of saying words and thereby proving someone else's point or agreeing with them when I am no way doing so...

Are dwarves really the species we want to use as an example of species design here? Dwarves are as ISO standard as they come. Beards, axes, hammers and being John Rhys Davis.

Hey sometimes they're Richard Armitage!

 

[Faolyn]

I have several different types of mice in my garden too. but I can't tell what makes a house mouse different from a field mouse.

Field Mouse vs House Mouse: What’s the Difference?

A field mouse and a house mouse can appear very similar upon first glance, but there are differences. Read more about these rodents now!

a-z-animals.com

 

[Cadence]

Report from the Royal Society of Organized Naturalistic Investigation
On Debunking the Racialist Claims Concerning The Characteristics of Dwarves and Halflings
As investigated in the 10th year of the Fifth Era

We randomly selected 25 mountain dwarves and 25 stout halflings from the tax rolls of the kingdom. We then attempted to find a halfling that matched each dwarf on the big 6, career, background, and training. We did the same for finding a dwarf to match each halfling. This was judged to be adequately done for a total of 22 dwarf-halfling pairs out of the 50 possible by our matching sub-committee. To avoid bias, the sub-committee was selected from our society's dwarf and halfling members, and made up equally of each lineage. We also consulted the oracle of our patron who agreed with the subgroup's deliberative operations. We note that as compared to the full dwarf and halfling population respectively, the final 22 dwarves were on average higher on the DEX-big6 scale than the dwarven population as a whole and the final 22 halflings were on average slightly higher on both the CON-big6 and STR-big6 than the halfling population as a whole. We attribute this to random sampling error. The most enduring dwarf in the original sample and most dexterous halfling in the original sample were unable to find matches given the other restrictions and were not among the 22. We attribute this to natural random variation in the distributional extrema. (See Appendix A for detailed statistics on the 22 pairs).

We then put the selected pairs through various skills tests (see Appendix B). With two exceptions, regardless of the skill tested- from staged combat to academic studies to physical activity - the percent of times the halflings succeeded was higher than that of the dwarves. This ranged from the success rate being approximately 4% higher for tasks judged as "easy" for the particular pair (averaged to 84% vs. 80%), to approximately 1% higher for the tasks judged as "hard" for the particular pair (6% vs 5%). This was roughly constant across task types and persisted in an anti-magic shell. There were two noticeable exceptions: (1) in stonework - in this case the dwarves who were untrained in stone work performed as well as the halflings at the advanced apprentice level halflings, and the trained dwarves did noticeably better than that, and (2) even the dwarves who had no combat training were able to use leather and chain mail armor, and axes and hammers with none of the usual difficulties associated with lack of training in wearing armor or using specific weapons (as opposed to general combat training). The magi consulted were unable to find anything to contradict the dwarven claims of no formal training in those areas.

Next we conducted a large number of resiliency tests (see Appendix C). No differences were noted except in one area. The "Terror Test" using exposures to the various royal Scarecrows found a significant difference, with the halfling member of the pair being much less likely to be paralyzed into inaction (the overall chance of being rooted by horror was found to be around 40% for the dwarfs and only 31% for the halflings). This met with strong objection from a portion of the committee and a back up sample was obtained (albeit with less stringent matching) and subjected to the terror causing illusion spell of the third circle. It confirmed the initial findings and a consultation with the oracle confirmed the integrity of the operational plan.

At this juncture we note that two members were expelled from our assemblage for hypothesizing that the differences in favor of the halflings were simply due to mythological innate "Luck" and "Bravery". We have no place in our body for those who ascribe to such fables. We have requested that the Royal Society of Magi and Spiritualists investigate for possible outside interference in our experiments and for the possibility that some entities are able to void the standard anti-magic fields.


[Edit: It should be noted that no such differences occurred in previous studies that examined across the different hair colors of high elves, eye colors of humans, skin tones of wood gnomes, dialects of wood elves, or national origins of half-orcs, all after matching on big 6, career, background, and training]

 

[Mind of tempest]

"Not impactful" is exactly what halflings are meant to be. They were designed as observers, and a good observer has a minimal impact on the system.

Adventurers, as always, are the exception.

then why are they one of the big common races if they are meant to be bit parts?

 

[Lanefan]

To me that’s barely played and a waste of space. And note half orcs are likely getting the axe too.

When there's over 20 PC-playable species, getting played 4.7% of the time is pretty decent - above average, in fact - for a species not in the Big Three (Human, Half-Elf, and Elf) which between them take 30-40% of the pie.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Re: dwarves as the armor wearing race..kinda yeah, or do you think all the blacksmithing they do is to so they can make nifty metal decorations for their mines. (Also note: for all dwarves, their speed is not reduced by wearing heavy armor the way it would be for other races, probably coincidence though)

Dwarven armor is supposed to be better qaulity, but that doesn't mean I've ever seen dwarves depicted as "the race that wears armor" because... humans and elves wear armor too. And Elven armor is also special and cool. They also blacksmith weapons and tools, but they aren't the only weapon or tool using race.

But, aha, they don't reduce speed by wearing armor! That's different. But, hmmm, looking at the rules, most people don't have their speed reduced by wearing armor. My half-elf paladin wearing full plate never had his speed reduced. So where does this rule apply? Digging into it, your speed is reduced by 10 ft if you don't have the proper strength. AHA! So, it isn't that dwarves are particularly good with armor, it is that dwarves are stocky and strong and able to move well under heavy loads. THAT is something you could claim, but "they wear armor"... isn't.

When you talk about a skill, anything that makes you better at that skill makes you better at that skill..full stop.

"being better at a specific skill" =/= "is [Blank]"

An Owlin has a +2 dexterity, which helps them use daggers. That does not make Owlin "Dagger Masters" any more than it makes them "stealthy" Or maybe all Halflings are Duelists? After all, the rapier was a common dueling sword, and halflings are better with a rapier than... well, some races.

The reason halflings have historically been chosen as rogues is that they have historically had features that allow them to function as better rogues than many other races. Or is your position that someone has been strong-arming players into choosing that race/class combination against the better interests for 6 of the 8 years in this edition (also bananas)?

I'm not particularly interested in a trip down 50 years of mechanics. Let's look at 5e, we can even say "5e when the PHB was published"

Stout halflings got that dex and... that's about it for stealth abilities. This made them good as rogues... and fighters, and rangers, decent bards and barbarians, clerics, warlocks... You know, since Dexterity is kind of good for everyone, they could, in theory, have been anything.

Now, yes, Lightfoots were very good rogues. As were wood elves, high elves, half-elves, humans, and Forest gnomes.

But since I can keep making lists of everyone else, it seems like "halflings are the stealthy race" still is falling apart. You can make them stealthy, sure, but it doesn't seem to define their race in a way that isn't matched by (at a minimum) two of the other "core" races. Humans and Elves.

 

[Chaosmancer]

That seems crazy to me. None of these animals are closely related, why would the anthropomorphic versions be?

Tropes.

Really, that's the answer. Generally "beast men" in fantasy I've consumed are vastly different (though usually don't include reptile species) but all a related species. If it is generic enough, you can also cover ideas that aren't specifically listed, but that you can get "close enough"

It also helps when you have players looking for "I want to be a beast character" to have all of them gathered together in one heading, instead of spread out among multiple places.